Ridder Thirst
2015 – 18
HD Projection with double seating structure
13’36 min

Narrator
Wessel Pretorius

Cast in order of appearance
Darkroom: Hentie van der Merwe

Students: Pierre Vermeulen, Stephan Rheeder, Alana Blignaut, and Strauss Louw

Flutist: Myles Roberts

Screenplay, cinematography & editing
Abri de Swardt


Score & sound design
Ben Ludik


Jeweller
Mouroodah Darries


Assistant
Strauss Louw

Installation view Ridder Thirst, POOL, Johannesburg, 26 April - 17 June 2018

Ridder Thirst
2015 – 18
HD Projection with double seating structure
13’36 min

Ridder Thirst explores the agency and limits of queer youth during Fallism, the transformative political movement that emerged in the wake of South Africa’s Rhodes Must Fall protests of 2015. The video interrogates how white supremacy is expressed through, and attenuated by, the Eersterivier (First River), a primary site of settler inhabitation in South Africa. De Swardt foregrounds the river as witness of extreme social discrepancies by moving from its mouth at the former separate amenity of Macassar Beach to Stellenbosch, the affluent university town originally set aside for settlers quitting the Dutch East India Company at the first river after Cape Town. Photographs of Afrikaner student couples captured at the river during apartheid by Alice Mertens, a Namibian-German ethnographic photographer who was the first tertiary tutor of the lens in South Africa, are called into question through anti-monumental gestures, motion-tracked cut-outs, and dense voice-over narration.

The composed figure of the narrator with his tale of how the ‘Shadow Prince and his Battalion of Shades’ ‘rolls up’ and ‘buries’ the First River, becomes increasingly brutal, and at turns tender, as the video progresses, culminating in an anachronistic flute coda overlooking Stellenbosch and the Cape Peninsula. Ridder Thirst links lingering colonial topologies with the framing of landscape as land ownership in photographic acts, countering possessive practices with the personhood of the river.

Ridder Thirst LP
2016 – 18
With Stephané E. Conradie, Metode en Tegniek, Athi Mongezeleli Joja, Pierre Fouché, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Rachel Collet, Alida Eloff and Abri de Swardt
Double 12’’ Vinyl Record
62’40 min

Recorded by Dawid de Villiers, Pierre Fouché, André Hurter, Thapelo M. Kotlhai and Pierre-Arnold Theron
Mastered by Dawid de Villiers at Stellenbosch University Studios
Lathe Cut by Contour Vinyl

FACE A

Stephané E. Conradie The Dustbin: a reflection 07’16
Metode en Tegniek Visogies & Lafayette 04’28

FACE B

Athi Mongeseleli Joja Ghosts 13’52
Pierre Fouché Sondagmiddag Geesteswetenskappe 05’35

FACE C

Khanyisile Mbongwa Mombathiseni UnoDolly Wam 06’34
Rachel Collet The Flood 07’23

FACE D

Alida Eloff An Open Letter to Mrs. M.H. Venter On the power of lemons, walking nowhere, and being rich by association with an African Grey (Written in response to an open letter addressed to Dear White South Africans, an open letter addressed to Dear Black South Africans, an open letter addressed to the Young People of the American Horse School, an open letter addressed to Oscar Pistorius, the horrific visual entity that is the slaughter chicken, and to being addressed, on 17 February 2015, during the unspoken lunch-hour, by yet another stranger in a bank) 07’25
Abri de Swardt Ridder Thirst (Voiceover) 11’27

Installation view Ridder Thirst, POOL, Johannesburg, 26 April - 17 June 2018

Ridder Thirst LP
2016 – 18
With Stephané E. Conradie, Metode en Tegniek, Athi Mongezeleli Joja, Pierre Fouché, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Rachel Collet, Alida Eloff and Abri de Swardt
Double 12’’ Vinyl Record
62’40 min

Gatefold cover designed by Abri de Swardt
Marijke Tymbios and Jeanne Gaigher photographed by Strauss Louw, featuring crowns by Abri de Swardt, and jewellery by Mouroodah Darries, Carla Maxine Germann, Joani Groenewald, Nora Kovats, and Lani van Niekerk
Font design by Monique Biscombe

The Ridder Thirst LP accentuates listening as decolonial act. The double 12’’ vinyl record features commissions by artists, student activists, curators, academics, musicians and writers Stephané E. Conradie, Metode en Tegniek, Athi Mongezeleli Joja, Pierre Fouché, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Rachel Collet, Abri de Swardt and Alida Eloff. Each of the four sides of the record present two tracks in dialogue, pairing divergent formats such as judiciary documents, punk music, the lecture, the fable, and paralinguistic expressions. A trilingual (English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans) sonic forum, the record approaches collective deliberations upon place through expansive oral histories and alternative modes of storytelling.

Stephané E. Conradie revisits a letter written upon the instructions of a magistrate to justify her actions of setting a dustbin alight during the Fees Must Fall protests; Athi Mongezeleli Joja lectures on the relations between white supremacy and myth by way of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-wine Drinkard, folkloric river serpents and Hortense Spillers; Pierre Fouché archives the erotic camaraderie of a five-man circle jerk; Khanyisile Mbongwa’s Mombathiseni UnoDolly Wam centres black self-love and the spatial imperatives of decolonisation through ‘a testimony of a friend who could not be here herself’; and two Afrikaans plaaspunk (farm punk) numbers by Metode en Tegniek sardonically lament student debt and middle-class indifference.

Eerste Waterval
2018
Steel hoop, plastic bag, debris from Jonkershoek, Stellenbosch, Eerste River and Macassar, collected at the mouth of the First River at Macassar Beach
Dimensions variable

In Eerste Waterval (Afrikaans for ‘First Waterfall’), an elongated waste removal bag strung from a steel hoop resembles a used condom, referring to both colonialism as rape of history and depletion of natural resources. As delta and catchment of the river are brought together through debris collected at the First River mouth, the effects of enclosure, contamination, neglect and erasure that accrue along the way are made tangible.

Words Beneath Bridges
2020
Performed with Hendrik Nieuwoudt and Quinton Manning
45’00 min

Written by Abri de Swardt, featuring an extract from Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (Taurus: 1984)

Performance views Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch, 7, 8 and 10 March 2020

Words Beneath Bridges is a site-responsive performance exploring how polyvocal articulations of disidentification can lead to collective action. The work is structured as four ‘sunstrokes of voice’ – 1. Pour Piece, 2. (Recapitulation), 3. History-is-n-drag-name, 4. Spark Notes (The Wet and the Dry) – sequences that transpose collage techniques such as cut-up text, image occlusion, object insertion and spatial displacement to performance in order to saturate and estrange located voice. Sparked by graffiti under Stellenbosch's Coetzenburg bridge reading Real EYES Realise Real Lies, the performance entangles how campus cultures sustain toxic masculinities with South Africa’s violent viniculture history, unravelling both. Vine and oak leaves appear in the work as vectors of colonised land, while a choreography with a tripod signals the entrapments of recording queerness. Through a theatre of the student, the performers slip between states of exhaustion, fury, play and recuperation, presented as leaking and wetted bodies in friction with sanctioned nomenclature, affiliation and visibility.

Words Beneath Bridges
2018
Performed with Danie Putter and Quinton Manning
40’00 min

Written by Abri de Swardt, featuring an extract from Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (Taurus: 1984)

Performance views The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg, 12 April 2018

Streams
2015, 2018 – ongoing
Giclée Prints on Hahnemühle Baryte
750 x 500 mm

Installation view POOL, with insulation foil cut-outs

World
2018
Neon mounted on Perspex
550 x 1000 mm